Mother and daughter ‘killed five relatives in botched murder-suicide pact’
Shana Decree and her daughter were heard softly crying in courtroom on Tuesday.
A mother and daughter are facing execution for killing their five relatives in a botched murder-suicide pact, prosecutors said.
Shana Decree, 46, and her daughter 20-year-old daughter Dominique pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to murdering their five family members who were found dead in their home in Morrisville, Pennsylvania in February 2019.
Shana Decree and her daughter were heard softly crying in courtroom, where Judge Wallace Bateman granted prosecutors more time to decide whether to seek the death penalty.
‘A case with this magnitude of tragedy, this magnitude of criminality, requires a superlative level of effort,’ Deputy District Attorney Christopher Rees told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
‘To put it bluntly, we don’t want to get anything wrong, because these victims deserve our best, and we’re willing to take as much time as we need to get it right.’
Prosecutors will now have until March 20 to argue why the Decrees should be put to death for killing Shana’s nine-year-old twin daughters, Imani and Ericka Allen, her 13-year-old son Damon Decree, her 25-year-old daughter Maa’Irah Smith and her sister Jamilla Campbell, 42.
Investigators said the horrific domestic violence case saw Shana and her daughter make a murder-suicide pact which they never carried fully carried out.
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All five victims were found dead in a bedroom, police said. Four had been asphyxiated and one was strangled.
Down the Hall, Shana and her daughter were found disoriented in another bedroom filled with overturned furniture, which investigators said showed signs of struggle.
Shana and Dominique later told police nearly identical stories, claiming that everyone in the apartment ‘wanted to die’ and often talked about suicide.
They both admitted to the murder-suicide pact, although their stories differed on who killed whom.
In the wake of the murders, family members claimed Shana and Dominique joined a ‘cult that materialized online.’
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Damon Decree Sr, Dominique and Damon Jr’s father, said the family had been ‘talking about demons being all around them’ before the murders.
‘They were all going through something religiously and they decided to drag the kids into it,’ Destiny Harris, the half sister of the twins, said.
On Tuesday, Rees did not comment on a motive, but said more will be revealed during the trial, which is set for June.